Re: [Marxism] Christianity and homosexuality

[brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Haines Brown)]

Brian passes along an interesting text that suggests the Christian
attitude toward same-sex marriage is ambivalent and not necessarily
contrary to it. However, I believe the text ends by obscuring the
issue rather than moving it forward. I would like to criticize it on
two grounds. First, it fails to distinguish two quite different
categories: individual bonding and the sacrament of marriage, and it
seems to omit the most important thing, love. Second, the author
apparently seeks to preserve the legitimacy of the Christian sacrament
of marriage by widening it to include what our culture increasingly
recognizes to be authentic and important loving relationships among
same-sex couples.

The author does not make clear that there are really three quite
different things involved here: a mutual commitment and bond between
two (or more) individuals (which we call "marriage"), and a Christian
sacrament (also called "marriage"), and the affective relationship we
call love. Each is a cultural expression that depends on particular
circumstances and is by no means fixed in character.

The secular bond has served many purposes in history. It can provide a
stable framework necessary for raising children; it can serve an
economic function (such as involving land tenure); and it can have a
social function (such as a determinant of individual social status or
group relations - political marriages and exogamy to associate
clans). And, today, young people often aim for companionship or the
enhanced economic security of two incomes and reduced housing and food
costs. All such functions and others are very much a reflection of a
particular time, place and circumstance.

Today we assume that the state has a role in ensuring the stability of
the secular marriage bond by recognizing it in law so that it might
better satisfy one or more of its functions. However, such a role for
the state is fairly modern. Through much of history, a couple simply
resided together, and that constituted marriage. In some cases, public
notice (bans) were required or impregnation constituted a marriage;
sometimes merely the sex act would established it. In Russian
tradition, when a couple finds that their daughter has a serious
relationship with her beau, they are put into bed together, and that
creates a marriage in the sense of a stable bond. The word "bundling"
refers to an American tradition of placing the couple together in bed
to mark such a permanent bond. Even when the Christian ceremony was
felt to be desirable, the priest needed to consummate it was often
unavailable and the marriage occurred without his involvement. When
the priest did happen to pass by on his circuit, the sacrament was
performed after the fact of an existing marriage. The point is that a
stable bond between two individuals has had a variety of functions and
is consummated in different ways.

There is no necessary implication of gender in much of this and, what
is more to the point, the role of gender is also a function of
culture. There is no reason why a given culture could not recognize a
same-sex marriage (in the sense of a stable bond) with the same legal
protections and advantages as heterosexual marriage (in the same
sense) if people generally felt it was useful and desirable.

The Christian sacrament of marriage is only loosely associated with
this secular marriage bond. It is worth remembering that most
sacraments, including marriage, were not invented until about the 11th
century. In the Carolingian period, for example, the creation of a
marriage was not a concern of the Church, although it tried to
regulate marriage in the case of the aristocracy. For example, in
Hincmar of Rheims' "De divortio Lotharii" (which is why Nicholas Rowe
named a libertine character Lothario in his play "The Fair Penitent"
[1703]), a marriage was not considered to exist if no vaginal sex had
taken place. Lothar claimed he only had "interfemural intercourse"
with his wife, not vaginal intercourse, and therefore was not really
married and had every right to pick up with another women whom he
thought could bear him children. The point is that the Christian
notion of marriage has evolved as much as its practice in secular
culture. Appeals to the Bible, either for or against same-sex
marriage, is only a way to legitimate whatever position one would like
to take in the matter, and selected quotes are hardly compelling,
especially given the Bible's ambiguity and history.

Brian's quoted text also makes reference to different levels of love:
in the Old Testament, David's love for Jonathan exceeded that of the
love for a woman. Not only is there a danger confusing a stable bond
between two people serving various purposes with the Christian
sacrament of marriage, but also mixing in the issue of love. Love is
often an important ingredient of marriage, but not necessarily, for
love certainly exists outside the framework of marriage, and is often
not present in it. A hierarchy of the modes of love has often been
discussed in terms of eros, amicitia, amor and caritas. In
Christianity, love actually has a longer pedigree as a de facto
sacrament than marriage. I cannot readily provide the reference, but
in the journal Speculum there was an article about love for another
person (gender was irrelevant) in which the beloved stands for Christ
and mediates God's grace. The Benedictine Rule, which goes way back,
is the origin of this idea. With the development of feudal ideology in
the high Medieval Ages, a distinction arose between the love of
peasants, which ceased being sacramental, and the love of aristocrats,
which remained sacramental. Love seems a very complicated issue that
has no necessary relation to marriage.

Gender is also ambivalent and much a product of culture. Among the
Taino Indians in the New World, for example, certain women in the
tribe were surrogate men, functioning in society with a man's role. As
for sexual orientation, it now seems clear that it is not cultural
(nor a matter of personal choice), but is entirely determined by
birth. While this is a new area of study and much remains unknown,
what few conclusions appear certain is that sexual orientation (the
probability of same gender attraction) is an accident of genes and of
hormonal influences on the embryo and nothing else. That is, it is
established at birth.

In some societies, homosexual orientation was ignored or even
repressed, but today, thanks actually to the bourgeois revolution,
there is a much greater possibility for the development and expression
of individuality, and bourgeois culture is only slowly coming to
recognize that individuality includes sexual orientation. That is,
same-sex marriage is really an issue that engages bourgeois culture,
for there is a contradiction between the development of individuality
and bourgeois Christian ideology.

If this be true, what would a working-class (socialist or communist)
outlook be? The proletarian revolution builds on the achievements of
the bourgeois revolution and therefor should give even greater scope
to the development of the individual because people's social being now
owns the means of production. At the same time, a working-class
ideology is materialist and so naturally makes irrelevant any
bourgeois ideological superstitions such as religion. Under communism,
the ability to transcend circumstance arises from potentials that are
actually present in real circumstances, not from some future ideal or
supernatural power.

It seems to me, therefore, that the struggle for progress today
naturally entails a struggle against a culture that would restrict the
kinds of positive relationships into which people might enter. Free of
most traditional functions of marriage, a bond between individuals
reduces to that of love, in which they establish a dialectical
relationship from which a social unity emerges thanks to the mutual
struggle of both participants. This supersedes the bourgeois idea of a
contract between individuals that addresses their past needs or
characteristics. In such a dialectical relationship, in which marriage
becomes an emergent process, each partner develops in way that
achieves a unity that realizes their social being and lifts them from
a mere biological existence.

Some socialists have advocated "free love" (promiscuousness), but that
seems unwarranted. Promiscuity is simply an example of people's
reduction to their biological nature, which Marx held to be the effect
of capitalist society on proletarian life. For a dialectical
relationship to exist in which a marriage might offer a framework to
realize our social being at the lowest level of society, it needs a
degree of stability and perhaps even monogamy (although this point
might be disputed). It seems to me that it is to the interest of
society as a whole to encourage stable relationships rather than just
let a thousand flowers bloom. I'm very uncertain about it, but perhaps
law offers an appropriate constraint that can bring stability to
serious relationships in order to enhance the chance for a dialectical
relationship between the partners to develop and mature (a significant
tax imposed on unmarried individuals?).

The text quoted by Brian is well written and seeks to justify values
that many of us happen to share. However, it does not serve us well if
it is shallow, parochial and limited to a contradiction found in
bourgeois culture without pointing to its resolution.

--

       Haines Brown
         KB1GRM
         ET1(SS) U.S.S. Irex 482

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